Next Shivaji turned his attention
northward:
among many other raids, in 1664 he attacked and looted the Mughals'
wealthy
port town of Surat

During a daring night attack in
1663, Shivaji
wounded Shaista Khan (Aurangzeb's maternal uncle), who had seized and
held
Pune in retaliation for Shivaji's raiding; a famous account is provided
by *François
Bernier*

In 1666 the Mughal general in the
Deccan,
Raja Jai Singh I, arranged for Shivaji to travel to Delhi and to be
received
by Aurangzeb; but court politics wrecked the chance of what might have
been a remarkable Mughal-Maratha future

Panhala (near Kolhapur), the
largest fort
in the Deccan, was one of Shivaji's favorites, and changed hands often;
Aurangzeb held it briefly in 1701

Shivaji made Raigarh Fort his
capital; in
1674, he held an elaborate coronation ceremony for himself there; in
1680,
he died there of a fever

Aurangzeb came down in 1681 and
easily conquered
*Golconda* and *Bijapur*;
but never could subdue the Marathas; he died in Aurangabad in 1707,
without
ever returning to North India

After much turbulence and
factional fighting,
in 1749 POONA became the official Maratha capital and seat
of the Peshwa, or hereditary prime minister

In 1755, the Peshwa and the
British cooperated
to attack and capture Gheriah and other pirate forts on the Malabar
Coast
(*Biddulph's
account*); but they could never conquer the Siddis' island fort of *Janjira*

Having defeated the Nizam of *Hyderabad*
and extracted territory from him, the Marathas reached the apogee of
their
power in 1760

But in 1761, a North Indian
Muslim-Afghan
coalition (using the then-newly-made cannon *Zamzamah*)
defeated
them decisively in the Third Battle of Panipat; after this the
Marathas split along clan lines, and their hopes for empire faded

Views by James Forbes, c.1775;
British dealings
with the many Maratha clan leaders were immensely complex, and there
were
four separate "Anglo-Maratha Wars"

Amidst all the confusion,
Ahilyabai Holkar
(r.1767-95) ended up ruling Malwa; she's especially remembered for the
number of temples she built

In 1790 the Peshwa agreed to an
alliance
with the British against *Tipu
Sultan*

Lieutenant George FitzClarence,
the illegitimate
son of William IV, fought in the Maratha Wars, and published a book
with
some of his sketches

After the Fourth Anglo-Maratha War
(1817-19),
the Peshwa's dominions were added to the *Bombay*
Presidency